![The Dark Knight Rises (DVD) [2012]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91HM6470jLL._AC_UL160_SR113,160_.jpg)
it took me a few years to fully process just what is "wrong" with the film. For a Batman film, it's great and masterful, but because of its predecessor, it's perpetually caught in its shadow, in part because, rather than escalate the themes introduced from the very start with Batman Begins (escalation of mob violence and corruption, police militarization, and the increasingly fragile 'cold war' of police vs organized crime), it throws them all away in order to clumsily mess around with some entirely new themes vaguely resembling income inequality and social upheaval.
The problem is this isn't approached in a smart or compelling way, and any potential complexity behind the motives of the villain, Bane, are sucked away by the plain and simple black and white explanation of his origin to let you know, he's pure evil, there's nothing behind his "man of the people" revolutionary shtick. As a result, this completely undermines Bane as a character. Why does he have a huge cult following? Or has he somehow managed to successfully hide his ulterior motives from every one of his supporters and followers?
That only raises further questions, such as; if Bane was able to achieve this massive amount of success in his objectives while playing as a "Peasant Revolutionary", then why not run with it on an even greater scale? Overthrow state officials, possibly disrupt on a federal level, instead of pissing it all away to stick it to a single city?
Meanwhile, we're distracted by the thoroughly pointless and thoroughly fantastical subplot involving Selina Kyle slipping into various situations and getting vaguely involved with other plotlines in order to get ahold of some impossible tech which magically erases all traces of a person's identity, online and off, which demonstrates a classic Hollywood-style misunderstanding of the Internet and federal databases. This is the sort of plotline which might have worked for Bruce Wayne himself, not on an essentially new character we've just met and have nothing invested in.
The long, meandering plot line overall is caked with plotholes and questionable incidents which could easily be resolved or addressed (such as Bruce Wayne's fingerprints being used to steal money and plunge his company's stock) which are instead allowed to run their course in a nonsensical way just so Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle can awkwardly flirt.
The beginning of the film (after Bane's introduction) seems entirely devoted to (expo)dumping the entire contents of the previous two films, finishing them up neat and tidy with a "the Dent Act solved literally all organized crime problems, somehow" before moving on, less like a finale to a grand three-act story, and more like dumping the baggage of a larger story in order to settle in to "Franchise Mode" and start churning out new self-contained movies every few years, like Bond films.
This film isn't a big finale to the previous two films. It's just the next "Batman" film in the franchise, treading water and soaking up money until it's time to switch over to the next set of filmmakers.
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